TV Stations and How They Can Use Push Notifications

At Interapt, our clients are asking us to build in push notification services across multiple platforms, guiding their customers to act on an offering, such as a restaurant pushing discounted appetizers on a given day.

These clients have asked us to offer this push notification as a transmedia offering: as a Tweet, a Facebook posting and also a push to iPhone or Android users.

What’s unique about our system is that we can reach 100,000 customers via our server and engine simultaneously. When you need to reach those larger numbers for mass distribution, thats when you look for a technology partner that has the capacity to handle such big numbers.

While anyone can build a push notification plug-in, the important part is creating the ability to handle 100,000 push notifications at once. Our programmers have to worry about threading, whether or not to code in .net, .php, how the end user sees the notification, and similar issues. We provide the framework and the engine upon which we can build many different skins for our clients depending on their line of business.

In the instance of TV news stations, we have built a push notification app that enables the user to customize their news station app based on their keyword choices, such as pop culture, weather, breaking news stories, and more. The end user has allowed the push notification service to be part of their smart phone as the result of downloading the app, so they will receive the push notifications regardless. For users driving in their cars, they can opt out of watching the video and choose the audio only version of the breaking news story.

Currently, push notifications have an open rate of 95%. As more apps are downloaded and push notifications become more pervasive, we will be keeping a careful eye on how this number trends as a result.